The Data
The data for today comes from the the 2021 Australian Census. We’ll be looking at participation in voluntary work today.
One of the purposes of education is to prepare people for participation in society, and engagement in voluntary work is generally considered a pro-social behaviour. My initial plan was to look at how participation rate might be correlated with the level of education received, or industry of employment, as these are factors that are likely to influence people’s access to volunteering opportunities, or their general attitude towards volunteering. Unfortunately, the data to address those queries have yet to be released at the point of making this dashboard. Instead, I will be substituting them with data on weekly person income, and the highest level of high school completed.
The workflow is as follows:
I picked the three sets of data partly because they shared community profile information on gender and age, in the hope that it would allow me to draw out more relationships between the areas of concern.
Cleaning for the most part was related to renaming columns and creating flags for the various parts of the data, so that they are easier to find and work with in Tableau.
The Dashboard
Naturally, my first instinct was to utilise the spatial data in hopes of identifying some interesting distribution. However, it became too unwieldy to visualise, and it offered too little insights to justify its presence over any other charts.
The Insights
I wanted to explore two general topics.
Firstly, are there any relationships between high school completion and participation in volunteer work? We can treat the various statistical areas in the data as samples of the population.
In the chart above, the x-axis represents the proportion of residents in the suburb or locality who have completed a Year 12 or equivalent education, while the y-axis represents the percentage of residents who participated in volunteer work for an organisation. In general, there is a positive correlation between high school completion and volunteer work, with the woman generally participating in more volunteer work than men.
There was also different levels of engagement with volunteering between different age groups.